On 2/11/2004 4:24 PM, Michael G Schwern wrote:
The biggest time suck in developing MakeMaker, and to a lesser extent
Test::More, is running the tests. Why? Because they need to be run on
lots of different platforms with lots of different versions of Perl.
Currently, I do this by hand. And we all know manual testing sucks.
Its time consuming and you tend to avoid it. I can't run the tests on
every platform at every patch so I often wind up breaking something and
not realizing it for a while.
So what I need is some way to set up a network of test servers such that
I can say "test this module for me" and my testing client would ship it
to as many test servers as it can find and get the results back all in
just a few minutes.
How about a model that allows people to volunteer when they can (vs
always). Say you have a server. You would be an author-client. You'd say
I have this software that needs to be tested. The server would take it
and mark it available for testing. Then test-clients could log-on (or
more probably set a cron job or login script). The server would say to
clients that login, "Ok, I have these jobs that need testing." The
client would take any module (or might possibly have a list of preferred
modules to test), test it, and send results. I'd suggest using the
cpan-testers backend for this; that way, the jobs mostly done. All you
have to do is write a cgi script to accept uploads from authors and give
clients an appropriate link to retrieve the module for testing. Instant
compiler-farm.
Randy.
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